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Neural activity at the human olfactory epithelium reflects olfactory perception

Nature Neuroscience volume 14, pages 1455–1461 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Organization of receptive surfaces reflects primary axes of perception. In vision, retinal coordinates reflect spatial coordinates. In audition, cochlear coordinates reflect tonal coordinates. However, the rules underlying the organization of the olfactory receptive surface are unknown. To test the hypothesis that organization of the olfactory epithelium reflects olfactory perception, we inserted an electrode into the human olfactory epithelium to directly measure odorant-induced evoked responses. We found that pairwise differences in odorant pleasantness predicted pairwise differences in response magnitude; that is, a location that responded maximally to a pleasant odorant was likely to respond strongly to other pleasant odorants, and a location that responded maximally to an unpleasant odorant was likely to respond strongly to other unpleasant odorants. Moreover, the extent of an individual's perceptual span predicted their span in evoked response. This suggests that, similarly to receptor surfaces for vision and audition, organization of the olfactory receptor surface reflects key axes of perception.

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Figure 1: Experimental scheme.
Figure 2: Different localizer odorants revealed different epithelial response profiles.
Figure 3: A common localizer odorant revealed common epithelial response profiles.
Figure 4: An external common localizer odorant revealed a bimodal epithelial response profile.
Figure 5: EOGs were unrelated to odorant sorption.
Figure 6: EOGs were tuned to olfactory perception.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by ERC-FP7 Ideas grant #200850 and by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    Hadas Lapid, Sagit Shushan, Anton Plotkin, Elad Schneidman & Noam Sobel

  2. Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    Hadas Lapid

  3. Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Edith Wolfson Medical Center, Tel-Aviv University Sackler School of Medicine, Holon, Israel

    Sagit Shushan & Yehudah Roth

  4. Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel

    Hillary Voet

  5. Smell and Taste Clinic, University of Dresden Medical School, Dresden, Germany

    Thomas Hummel

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  1. Hadas Lapid
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Contributions

H.L. and N.S. conceived the study. H.L., S.S., A.P., T.H., Y.R. and N.S. designed the experiments. H.L., S.S. and A.P. performed the experiments. H.L., E.S., H.V. and N.S. analyzed the data. H.L., T.H., E.S. and N.S. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hadas Lapid or Noam Sobel.

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Lapid, H., Shushan, S., Plotkin, A. et al. Neural activity at the human olfactory epithelium reflects olfactory perception. Nat Neurosci 14, 1455–1461 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2926

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